The Fowl Twins. Eoin Colfer

A gruesome title that would put most normal people off reading it, but Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, Duke of Scilly, was not a normal person, and the juiciest phrases in his copy of The Criminal Mastermind’s Almanac were marked in pink highlighter, and the book itself was dedicated as follows:

       To Teddy

       From one criminal mastermind to another

       Don’t be a stranger

       Wulfy

      Lord Bleedham-Drye had dedicated most of his one hundred and fifty-plus years on this green Earth to staying on this green Earth as long as possible, as opposed to being buried beneath it. In television interviews, he credited his youthful appearance to yoga and fish oil, but, in actual fact, Lord Teddy had spent much of his inherited fortune travelling the globe in search of any potions and pills, legal or not, that would extend his lifespan. As a roving ambassador for the Crown, Lord Teddy could easily find an excuse to visit the most far-flung corners of the planet in the name of culture, when in fact he was keeping his eyes open for anything that grew, swam, waddled or crawled that would help him stay alive for even a minute longer than his allotted three score and ten.

      So far in his quest, Lord Teddy had tried every so-called eternal-youth therapy for which there was even the flimsiest of supporting evidence. He had, among other things, ingested tonnes of willow-bark extract, swallowed millions of antioxidant tablets, slurped litres of therapeutic arsenic, injected the cerebrospinal fluid of the endangered Madagascan lemur, devoured countless helpings of Southeast Asian liver-fluke spaghetti, and spent almost a month suspended over an active volcanic rift in Iceland, funnelling the restorative volcanic gas up the leg holes of his linen shorts. These and other extreme practices – never, ever to be tried at home – had indeed kept Bleedham-Drye breathing and vital thus far, but there had been side-effects. The lemur fluid had caused his forearms to elongate so that his hands dangled below his knees. The arsenic had paralysed the left corner of his mouth so that it was forever curled in a sardonic sneer, and the volcanic embers had scalded his bottom, forcing Teddy to walk in a slightly bow-legged manner as though trying to keep his balance in rough seas. Bleedham-Drye considered these secondary effects a small price to pay for his wrinkle-free complexion, luxuriant mane of hair and spade of black beard, and of course the vigour that helped him endure lengthy treks and safaris in the hunt for any rumoured life-extenders.

      But Lord Teddy was all too aware that he had yet to hit the jackpot, therapeutically speaking, in regards to his quest for an unreasonably extended life. It was true that he had eked out a few extra decades, but what was that in the face of eternity? There were jellyfish that, as a matter of course, lived longer than he had. Jellyfish! They didn’t even have brains, for heaven’s sake.

      Teddy found himself frustrated, which he hated, because stress gave a fellow wrinkles.

      A new direction was called for.

      No more small-stakes half measures, cribbing a year here and a season there.

      I must find the fountain of youth, he resolved one evening while lying in his brass tub of electric eels, which he had heard did wonders for a chap’s circulation.

      As it turned out, Lord Bleedham-Drye did find the fountain of youth, but it was not a fountain in the traditional sense of the word, as the life-giving liquid was contained in the venom of a mythological creature. And the family he would possibly have to murder to access it was none other than the Fowls of Dublin, Ireland, who were not overly fond of being murdered.

      * * *

      This is how the entire regrettable episode kicked off:

      Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye reasoned that the time-honoured way of doing a thing was to ask the fellows who had already done the thing how they had managed to do it, and so he set out to interview the oldest people on Earth. This was not as easy as it might sound, even in the era of worldwide-webbery and marvellous miniature communication devices, for many aged folks do not advertise the fact that they have passed the century mark lest they be plagued by health-magazine journalists or telegrams from various queens. But nevertheless, over the course of five years, Lord Teddy managed to track down several of these elusive oldsters, finding them all to be either tediously virtuous, which was of little use to him, or lucky, which could neither be counted on nor stolen. And such was the way of it until he located an Irish monk who was working in an elephant sanctuary in California, of all places, having long since given up on helping humans. Brother Colman looked not a day over fifty, and was, in fact, in remarkable shape for a man who claimed to be almost five hundred years old.

      Once Lord Teddy had slipped a liberal dose of sodium pentothal into the Irishman’s tea, Brother Colman told a very interesting story of how the holy well on Dalkey Island had come by its healing waters when he was a monk there in the sixteenth century.

      Teddy did not believe a word of it, but the name Dalkey did sound an alarm bell somewhere in the back of his mind. A bell he muted for the present.

      The fool is raving, he thought. I gave him too much truth serum.

      With the so-called monk in a chemical daze, Bleedham-Drye performed a couple of simple verification checks, not really expecting anything exciting.

      First, he unbuttoned the man’s shirt, and found to his surprise that Brother Colman’s chest was latticed with ugly scars, which would be consistent with the man’s story but was not exactly proof.

      The idiot might have been gored by one of his own elephants, Teddy realised. But Lord Bleedham-Drye had seen many wounds in his time and never anything this dreadful on a living body.

      There ain’t no fooling my second test, thought Teddy, and with a flash of his pruning shears he snipped off Brother Colman’s left pinky. After all, radiocarbon dating never lied.

      It would be several weeks before the results came back from the Advanced Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory, and by that time Teddy was back in England once again, lounging dejectedly in his bath of electric eels in the family seat: Childerblaine House, on the island of St George in the Scilly Isles. Interestingly enough, the island had been so named because, in one of the various versions of the St George legend, the beheaded dragon’s body had been dumped into Cornish waters and drifted out to the Scilly Isles, where it settled on a submerged rock and fossilised, which provided a romantic explanation for the small island’s curved spine of ridges.

      When Lord Teddy came upon the envelope from AAMSL in his pile of mail, he sliced it open listlessly, fully expecting that the Brother Colman excursion had been a bally waste of precious time and shrinking fortune.

      But the results on that single page made Teddy sit up so quickly that several eels were slopped from the tub.

      ‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed, his halo of dark hair curled and vibrating from the eel charge. ‘I’m off to Dalkey Island, begorra.’

      The laboratory report was brief and cursory in the way of scientists:

      The supplied specimen, it read, is in the four-hundred- to five-hundred-year-old age range.

      Lord Teddy outfitted himself in his standard apparel of high boots, riding breeches, and a tweed hunting jacket, all topped off with his old commando beret. And he loaded up his wooden speedboat for what the police these days like to call a stakeout. It was only when he was halfway across the Irish Sea in the Juventas that Lord Teddy realised why the name Dalkey sounded so familiar. The Fowl fellow hung his hat there.

      Artemis Fowl.

      A force to be reckoned with. Teddy had heard a few stories about Artemis Fowl, and even more about his son Artemis the Second.

      Rumours, he told himself. Rumours, hearsay and balderdash.

      And, even if the stories were true, the Duke of Scilly’s determination never wavered.

      I shall have that troll’s venom, he thought,